Valuing the 60 Blog

Barring a life-threatening accident, brains are yours forever. Beauty lasts as long as you allow it. One can enhance one’s beauty with makeup or surgery. But you can’t enhance your brain capacity, can you?

What is beauty anyway? Is it in the eye of the beholder, as they say? Would you consider a 12-year old boy wearing makeup beautiful? We watched Ellen yesterday, and one of her guests was a 12-year old boy singer. (He will also be appearing on Little Big Shots this weekend.) I thought he had an okay voice (he was trying WAY too hard), and he was wearing lots of makeup. When he gets older, his goals are to “become a Kardashian” and to start his own makeup line.

I’m sorry. Equal rights for all. Equal pay for all. Unisex bathrooms. But makeup on boys? No. Is he going for beautiful? To be different? To make a statement? I’m confused.

I personally don’t know anyone who is transgender, and I personally don’t know any parents of children who are confused about their gender identity. I give those parents mad props for listening to their children when the child believes they are meant to be another gender. Their emotional, physical and financial support is incredibly commendable, and I give them all of my respect.

To me, this British boy singer seemed to just want the attention. Look at me, I’m on TV, I sing, and I wear makeup, and now you’re gonna talk about me. I’d like to see a follow-up in five or ten years. Will he be the next Ziggy Stardust or Adam Lambert? Is he trying to get through high school without being bullied?

But maybe I’m looking at this singing phenom the wrong way. Maybe he chose brains over beauty and is simply a marketing genius. He’ll have a million dollars before he’s out of high school because he found an untapped beauty market. I guess you can have brains AND beauty. “People will stare. Make it worth their while.” Harry Winston was right.